Free Cloud Storage in 2026: What You Get and When to Pay

The short answer is that the free tier from Google, Apple, Microsoft or Dropbox is enough for documents and almost never enough for photos and video. Every free plan is a sampler designed to run out, and the moment it runs out is the moment the provider starts charging you to keep reaching your own files. This article sets out what each free tier gives you, what the next step up costs, and what happens to your data if you stop paying. All figures were checked in September 2026 against each company’s own pricing and support pages, for United States consumer accounts.

What the free tiers actually give you

The headline numbers have barely moved in years. What has changed is how much space a modern phone camera consumes, which is the reason the free tiers feel smaller every year even though they are the same size.

Apple’s support documentation states plainly that a standard iCloud account comes with 5 GB of storage for free. Microsoft’s OneDrive plan comparison page states the same 5 GB figure. Google’s own plans page states that 15 GB is included with every Google Account. Dropbox’s Basic page states 2 GB and a three-device limit. Proton’s Drive pricing page states 5 GB on its free plan.

Put those numbers next to a phone. A single minute of video recorded at high quality can run to hundreds of megabytes. Five gigabytes is a weekend. Fifteen gigabytes is a few months if you also use the same account for email.

The catch is what counts against the quota

The free allowance is rarely spent on the thing you think you are storing. Google’s support article on how Google storage works states that the 15 GB pool is consumed by photos and videos backed up after 1 June 2021, including items uploaded in the compressed Storage saver quality, by Gmail messages and attachments including everything sitting in spam and trash, by files created in Docs, Sheets and Slides after 1 June 2021, and by Google Meet recordings, Android device backups and WhatsApp backups. A person who has never deliberately uploaded anything to Drive can still be at 14 GB because of a decade of email.

Microsoft’s storage quota page states that the consumer cloud storage figure covers email attachments, files and photos in OneDrive, with mailbox storage counted separately. Apple’s free 5 GB has to cover full device backups, which for a phone with a large photo library is the single biggest consumer of space. Dropbox is the cleanest case: 2 GB means 2 GB of files, and nothing else competes for it.

What happens when you go over

This is the part the marketing pages do not lead with, and it is the part that decides whether a free tier is safe to rely on.

Read those deletion clauses again. Two of the four largest providers publish an explicit point at which they will delete your files. That is not a threat buried in legal boilerplate; it is in the ordinary help pages, and it is enforced automatically.

What happens if you stop paying

Canceling a paid plan does not delete anything on the day you cancel. It drops you back to the free allowance, and if your data exceeds that allowance you are now an over-quota free user, which puts you on the timelines in the table above. With Dropbox this is the most direct: the help page on canceling an individual subscription states that you return to 2 GB, that you may not be able to sync, upload, share, move or preview, and that Dropbox may delete files you own to bring the account back under the limit.

The practical consequence is that you should never cancel a storage plan without first pulling everything down to a physical drive. Download first, cancel second. Doing it the other way round is how people lose photographs.

A five-year cost comparison

Storage is a subscription you will probably never cancel, so the honest way to compare plans is over several years rather than per month. The table below uses each provider’s published United States list price as of September 2026 and runs it over 60 months. No promotional discounts are included, because promotional discounts end.

Two things stand out. The first is that Microsoft 365 Family is the cheapest way to buy multi-terabyte storage for a household by a wide margin, and it includes the Office desktop applications, which the others do not. The second is that Dropbox Family costs more than half as much again as Microsoft 365 Family and delivers one third of the space. Dropbox is selling sync quality and sharing controls, not capacity, and it is worth being clear with yourself about which of those you are actually buying.

Three concrete scenarios

A decision rule

If you want a rule rather than a comparison, this one is short enough to apply in five minutes.

1. Check what you are actually storing. Open the storage management screen on your main account and look at the split between mail, photos and files. Most people find that one of the three accounts for more than three quarters of the total.
2. If photos are the problem and everyone in the household uses Apple devices, buy iCloud+ and stop reading. Nothing else backs up an iPhone without manual effort.
3. If photos are the problem and the household is mixed, buy Microsoft 365 Family and split it. Six terabytes at 129.99 dollars per year is the best capacity price on this list, and up to six people can use it.
4. If email is the problem, delete rather than buy. Sorting Gmail by attachment size and clearing spam and trash frequently recovers several gigabytes in an afternoon.
5. If you are considering Dropbox, ask what feature you need that the others lack. If you cannot name one, you are paying more for the same space.
6. Whatever you choose, keep one copy that is not in that account. An external drive costs less than a year of any of these plans and does not have a deletion policy.

The thing none of these plans give you

Cloud sync is not a backup. If a file is deleted, corrupted or encrypted by malware on your computer, the service will faithfully copy that change everywhere. Version history helps, but every provider limits how far back it goes, and on the free and cheapest tiers that window is short. The only arrangement that survives both a lost laptop and a mistake you made yourself is at least one copy that is not connected to the syncing account.

Where these figures come from

• Google One plans page and Google support articles titled “How your Google storage works” and “Manage your storage in Drive, Gmail and Photos”
• Apple Support articles “iCloud+ plans and pricing”, “Downgrade or cancel your iCloud+ plan” and the iCloud User Guide page on viewing and managing backups
• Microsoft OneDrive plan comparison page, Microsoft Support pages “Microsoft storage quotas” and “What does it mean when your OneDrive account is frozen?”
• Dropbox plan pages for Basic and individual plans, and Dropbox Help articles on exceeding storage space and on canceling an individual subscription
• Proton Drive pricing page

One last honest note. Prices on these plans move, and they have moved upward more often than downward. Nothing you have read here is a commitment by any of these companies to charge the same amount next year, and the switching cost of moving several hundred gigabytes between providers is high enough that most people simply absorb the increase. That asymmetry is the business model, and it is worth going in with your eyes open rather than assuming the monthly figure is fixed.

General information, current as of September 2026.